I’m typing this with great care, pressing each key delicately, with as little force as possible. Even so, it hurts. Soon the skin will start peeling off my fingertips. And if I get them really cold again, they might have to be amputated.
That’s what frostbite does to you. More precisely, that’s what taking your gloves off for a surprisingly short time in the Canadian far north can do for you. If, that is, the temperature is -39°C, with a wind-chill factor knocking off perhaps 20° extra.
Here inside the hotel, though, it’s delightfully warm. As I sit at the computer, I can see out into the street. A wild wind is blowing the surface snow along in sudden gusts. A single huddled figure in furs is fighting along, head into the blast. I’m immensely grateful for the cup of hot tea beside me, even if I have to handle it carefully. The cold, I’ve realised, is not my element.
Take me to the heart of the Amazon or the Congo when the temperature is in the high 40s, and I’ll be fine. But here in Iqaluit, the capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut, created in 1999, I don’t feel at home. The town is pleasant enough, in its straggling, unplanned way, with a few interesting shops and some excellent Inuit art. But I doubt, frankly, if I’ll be coming back any time soon.
I’m here to make a three-part documentary for the BBC with Ranulph Fiennes, the explorer, and Robin Knox-Johnston, the round-the-world sailor. We’ve already filmed in Afghanistan, my stamping ground, to show the other two what frontline journalism is like. We’ve sailed round Cape Horn, Robin’s speciality, with Ran and me as crew. And now we are in Ran Fiennes’s world: the world of ice and snow and hauling sledges.
It is so cold that Canadian television has led its news with the weather for two days. But down there in Toronto and Ottawa they’re talking about -20°C. Up here in northern Canada, it’s twice as bad as that. In Stalin’s Siberia, even the prisoners in the labour camps could stay indoors when the temperature reached -30°C. At -39°C, we went manhauling, out there somewhere across deep-frozen Frobisher Bay.
Nothing had prepared me for the ferocity of the wind, or the glorious beauty of the snowscape. At this time of year, the sun rises above the horizon only for a couple of hours, but twilight lasts far longer. It turns the snow anything from scarlet to deepest amethyst, and the greenness of the ice is ravishing. I may never have been anywhere so deeply uncomfortable, but I have rarely seen such sheer, heart-stopping beauty.
That was partly the reason for my downfall. The glory of the morning light on the snow slowed me down, because I spent too much time staring at it and too little time working out what I was going to do – or rather, how I was going to do it. Our expedition doctor, giving us a slide show about the dangers of frostbite, had told us that it was safer to go to the lavatory in our tent, in front of each other. I am sure he was right, but the spirit recoiled from performing such a basic function in the presence of a baronet and a knight in a tent only 8ft across. So I made my way out into the cold.
All would have been fine if it hadn’t been for an obstinate buckle on an otherwise excellent pair of duck-down-filled leggings. I fought it, but finally had to take my gloves off – all three pairs. Even so it took me a full minute to undo the buckle. Performing the basic bodily function was far quicker – the cold made certain of that. Then I washed my hands with snow: another bad mistake. After that I had to do the buckle up again.
At first I scarcely noticed what had happened. Of course, my fingers were numb, though that wasn’t surprising. But when I got back into the tent and looked at them, I saw the ends had gone waxy-white – the telltale sign of frostbite.
For some time, I resisted the doctor’s insistence that I should be medevaced out. The frostbite wasn’t too serious in itself, he said, but if I got another dose of it (which, in those temperatures, was perfectly possible), I might lose some of my fingers.
We all knew what that looked like. Ran Fiennes, suffering nine years before from a far worse case of frostbitten fingers than I had, had been so goaded by the pain that he had eventually amputated them himself. ‘It didn’t hurt at all,’ he explained to us in characteristic stiff-upper-lip fashion. This business of hauling sledges in the frozen north of Canada has convinced me that he is one of the toughest and bravest men I have ever met – and Knox-Johnston is right up there with him.
In the end, I realised I couldn’t stay. I did some manhauling, but could scarcely hold the ski poles I needed to keep walking. And every time I had to undo a button or a zip, someone had to help me. I imagined what it would be like in the night if I had to wake up one of the others to ask for a zip to be undone.
So, here I am, waiting in the warm for the first sight of the other two as they struggle back across the ice. I’ll head out and join them, and at least finish the epic that has taken us to some of the toughest places on earth.
Sure, my fingers hurt a bit, but I’ll never forget the far more painful beauty of the ice, which compensates for it all. Or Ran Fiennes’s grin as he said, ‘Don’t worry, John. I can always help you cut them off if you want.’
John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, which is available in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.
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